IT GOES ON

17th July - 2nd August 2008

Opens Wednesday 16th July 6 – 9pm

 

The Wallis Gallery is pleased to present IT GOES ON, an exhibition of recent work by Marianne Spurr. This will be her first solo show.

 

Featuring site-specific installations, a suite of photographs and drawings, found objects and film, the exhibition demonstrates Spurr’s free, playful and multi-disciplinary approach to making work. Responding directly to the space and carefully considering the placement of each piece within it, the artist seeks to forge relationships and open-ended narratives between each of her works. The show in its entirety can be seen to constitute a total landscape or world into which the viewer is immersed.

 

Exploring abstract formal concerns and the interplay between colour, texture and surface, Spurr often employs in her installations familiar and ‘low-brow’ household materials such as coil, wallpaper, wood and felt, recalling artists such as Eva Hesse, Robert Morris and ideas of 1960’s anti-form art. At the heart of her imagery and practical use of materials is the constant concern with questions of nature and artifice. Her simple juxtapositions of two or three elements in any given work formalise these questions and frame her reflections on the notion of balance and its importance as a controlling force in art. With her distinctively laconic and economical vocabulary she strives to make tangible a metaphysical idea of balance, and realise the emotional in the structural.

 

She employs photography and drawing as a means by which to capture and isolate these relationships within the real world and the everyday. Often turning her eye to discarded, abandoned objects, signs and overlooked spaces, she imbues these commonplace moments with a new and heightened significance.

 

Just as with the title of the show 'It Goes On', it is important to Spurr that her work remains open ended and non-explicit. She gently poses questions to the viewer. She opens a dialogue. There is an overriding sense in her work of a world in flux, of states changing, of forces moving and time passing. ‘It’ refers to everything and nothing, to art, to human effort, to nature, force, equilibrium. To time. To life.